A VERY SELECTIVE SILENCE
“Let hands do what lips do.” Shakespeare never meant the line so literally as it feels in R+J: The Vineyard. Red Theater Chicago delivers a bold resetting, moving the tragedy’s star-crossed lovers from 14th century Verona to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1890s.
According to adaptors Janette Bauer and director Aaron Sawyer, long before the Massachusetts island became a summer distraction for Barack Obama and elite A-listers, it sheltered an agricultural community populated in part by hereditary deaf families and friends. Seeking their own escape from the mainland, this diverse commune co-existed uncertainly–and, alas, briefly–with the hearing majority. They employed their own sign language which, setting them apart, upset local yokels disturbed by differences. Today this “deaf poets society” remains a hidden legacy, an exile within an enclave where exclusivity now comes from money, not disability.
This is the divisive context for Red Theater’s enterprising one-act transformation of Romeo and Juliet. A free public-access co-production with and at Oracle Productions, the 115-minute one-act imagines, as do the fateful lovers in four days of freedom, a “world without boundaries” where no one is shut out. Delivering all kinds of eloquence, Sawyer’s staging presents a richly varied menu of communication: We get signed language for the quietly lyrical scenes between Brendan Connelly and McKenna Liesman, the young and lovely lovers; projected captions for the Capulets; spoken and signed interpretations mediating between speech and seeming silence; and, as two worlds clash, “able-ist” slurs mocking deaf pronunciation in the taunts that provoke the street fights on this not so enchanted island.
Happily, the lovers rise above Vineyard’s inconsistent divisions between the non-hearing and the signing citizens. As Shakespeare’s dialogue dissolves into differences, it really helps to know the play, especially the courtship scenes between two literal-minded lovers crazy for metaphors. More so than in most nights of the Bard, manifold gestures, mime, signs and expressions show how the “eyes have it” and how much mouths can mean the words they make.
However often and variously told, Romeo and Juliet is a universal cautionary tale–of lovers rushing into death from sheer impatience with a hateful town. The gulf between hearing and speaking plays right into Shakespeare’s divide-and-conquer dynamic. Typical criteria, it goes without “saying,” don’t apply to R+J: Defying the usual standards that measure merit and motivation, these eleven performances–from a collective comprised of deaf, hard-of-hearing and ASL interpreters–inevitably open up an audience–and a critic–to a different, if not deeper, tragedy.
poster design by Jen Dorman
photos by Joe Mazza, Brave Lux
R+J: The Vineyard
Oracle Productions & Red Theater Chicago
Oracle Theatre, 3809 N Broadway
Fri, Sat & Mon at 8; Sun at 7
ends on November 21, 2015
EXTENDED to December 12, 2015EXTENSION January 22-Feb 20, 2016
The Den Theatre, 3rd Floor, 1333 N Milwaukee Ave
Fri thru Mon at 7:30
for reservations, visit Public Access Theatre
for more info, visit Red Theatre
for info on more Chicago Theater, visit Theatre in Chicago
